Repulsive and Enriching

The New York Times has not always treated poets well. “He will be gross, and there is no help for it”: In 1860, The Times published those words about Walt Whitman in an unsigned review of a third edition of “Leaves of Grass,” a larger and “still more pretentious” version than the previous two. “Mr. Whitman sees nothing vulgar in that which is commonly regarded as the grossest obscenity” and “rejects the laws of conventionality so completely as to become repulsive,” the review said, admitting that on occasion “a gleam of the true poetic fire shines out of the mass of his rubbish.”

History has been kinder to the paper’s assessment of other giants, including Percy Hutchison’s review of Yeats’s “Collected Poems” from 1933. “Remembering a poet, a poem, to the end of one’s life — that, if not the sole test of poetry, is one that ought never to be forgotten,” Hutchison wrote. And Yeats’s poems passed that test because “their music has sung them indelibly into the brain; their high emprise of spirit, their nobility of thought, brought enrichment of life.”

The Times followed Yeats so closely that in a brief 1936 news item headlined “W.B. Yeats Remains in Bed,” it wrote of his recovery from a heart attack: “The 70-year-old writer’s only visitor is a Swami philosopher with whom he discusses philosophy.”

Emily Dickinson famously evaded notice during her life, and in 1973 Nardi Reeder Campion wrote an essay for the Op-Ed page titled “A Delayed ‘Obituary,’ ” in which she praised Dickinson’s gifts: “With her bare, alert senses she could almost hear violets grow and feel the robin’s heart beat. Like Emerson, she found in each drop of dew, in each grain of sand, a copy of a universe.”

Quotable

“The whole thing of working in all these different mediums, it’s just so that I can always be playing hooky from one of them. I can always be rebelling against my boss.” — Miranda July, in an interview with The Believer

What Rhymes With ‘Greedo’?

As of this writing, “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” is still a few hours from its official opening, so it’s unknown exactly how many gazillion dollars it has already earned. Or how many poets it has inspired. Hello Poetry and All Poetry, websites where people share their verse, have pages devoted to work inspired by the films, with titles like “After Han Gave Leia That Kiss” and “He Shot Greedo First.”

Not all of the poems are love letters to the franchise. Owen Anthony Ferry’s poem “Star Wars,” a recitation of the original trilogy’s story line, ends with tongue in cheek: “they travel to a forest where they meet a few teddy bears / then the young man finds out the princess is his sister / then he meets his dad the dark lord who he then kills / then there is a teddy bears party.”